How to go to graduate school with five children

(and a husband)

• Make the best use of your time.
  • If you spend most of your time debugging - or even find yourself throwing away code and starting over - try planning better. If you write pseudo-code, you can usually determine if an approach is bad before investing hours.
  • If you spend a lot of time trying to decide how to begin, try letting your subconscious work for you. Read the assignment EARLY. Try sketching out possible solutions immediately. Then, let your brain think about it as you walk between classes, do grocery shopping, whatever. Then when you sit down to design, your brain has worked out lots of the details already. (I don't know if everyone's brain does this for them, but it is pretty common.)
  • Realize that not all time is the same. Work with your own high and low points. When you are designing, make sure you give yourself quality time - time when you generally are at your best in terms of intellectual ability. When you are commenting or finding syntax errors, you can be half asleep and do quite well. Give each stage of the task the kind of time it requires. Similarly, don't try to design when you are dead tired. If you have spent ten minutes trying to find a bug without success, you must do something different: get more debug, rest and come back, ask someone. Don't spent hours and hours hammering on the same problem. The chances of success are best during the first minutes spent on finding the problem.
• Decide what NOT to do. You can't do everything. Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. Five times an hour ask yourself, "What is the most important thing to be doing with my time right now?" I stopped sewing (my kids have been forever grateful) and didn't work while I was in grad school. I did bake a lot of cookies. It was important to me.
• Get your priorities straight. For me it was family, school, and church. Which one was first priority varied, depending on the circumstances. Children are only little once. If you don't enjoy their growing up, you will be forever sorry. A good friend of mine (my age) just had a little girl (her sixth child) and is trying to adopt another. She said, "Vicki, don't you feel like you missed something when your kids were little? They came so fast it was hard to enjoy them. At this point in my life, I can really enjoy a baby." I responded, "No. I didn't miss anything. I thoroughly enjoyed my children when they were little - as I enjoy them now. I have no regrets. I'll wait for grandchildren."
• Have a backup plan. I had great friends who tended my kids for me. I paid them well and let them know how much I appreciated them. I couldn't have done it without them. Steve was my backup - not my regular babysitter. That way when I got into a bind, he wasn't already burnt out from doing more than is humanly possible.
• Work from home whenever possible. For the four years I was in graduate school, I worked from home most of the time. I went into school three mornings a week - to take classes and meet with my peers, but other than that I worked from home. I learned to interleave activities. While the program was compiling, I ran out to watch my daughter ride her rocking horse. While I was baking cookies or reading stories, I was analyzing strategies for my next assignment. Working from home (with small children), I was only about fifty percent efficient - I worked two hours to get one hour of work done. That was okay. I was where I wanted to be.
• Take it easy. Slow and steady wins the race. There are no awards for finishing early. No one will ever ask you how long it took you to get your degree. Slow progress is better than burning out.
• Let everyone help. The kids were great. My husband was fantastic. He would have preferred to have a stay-at-home wife (we both came from very traditional families) - but he chose to let me be what I wanted to be. There was no such thing as men's work and women's work. We were interchangeable. Either of us did carpools, cooked dinner, bandaged a knee, volunteered at the school, mowed the lawn.
• That said, I still am utterly clueless as to how I did it. Some things are beyond earthly explanation.